LINQ Enabled Personal Web Site Starter Kit

Jim Wooley, VB MVP, has rewritten the original Personal Web Starter Kit using LINQ for the data tier rather than stored procedures and ADO.NET and has put it up onto Code Gallery. The starter kit manages images in a SQL database by album.

In your opinion, does LINQ replaces ADO.NET ? Until VS2008 was released, it seemed to me that the answer was "no", but now I have seconds thoughts; what are the compelling reasons why developers would not develop their data tier exclusively or primarily using LINQ? In your vision, why do we still need ADO.NET?

It's a common misconception that LINQ is just about SQL data access when in fact, it is not. LINQ stands for Language Integrated Query and allows you to query over ANY .NET object collection. There are LINQ providers to other data sources like DataSets, XML and then of course SQL. And don't forget LINQ to Entities either ;-).

Under the covers, the LINQ to SQL Provider is actually using ADO.NET. So no, ADO.NET is not going away. Depending on your application needs you may still need to control ADO.NET yourself or you can opt to use LINQ to SQL which abstracts away the ADO.NET code for you.